For one, even the oversimplification of when your "basic personaltiy is set" extends to 5 years old (and of course longer for some people).
For another, your idea of criminality is like something out of the 1800s and phrenology or something. People committing crime isn't just a matter of their "basic preschool personality". There's plenty of time, through puberty and even a little beyond, for people to learn to overcome even "basic personality" defects, and acquire the self control to stay away from crimes. It's even possible for adults to learn to change, or we'd see 100% recidivism especially with our usually counterproductive penal system.
But yes, looking at the person and deciding what will most likely stop them doing crimes in the future (without resorting to absurd remedies like handing them a permanent open ticket to Disneyworld or something) should be the basic operation of our corrections system.
there is little difference between 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption because neither has been broken yet.
It doesn't matter that much that there's little difference right now between 128-bit and 256-bit AES. It will matter later. There will almost certainly be time after 128-bit AES is broken but before 256-bit is broken. During that time, the extra 128 bits will mean the difference between secure and insecure. And remember, attackers who can read but not crack your messages can still keep them for later when they're crackable. If your messages still have value at that time, they will crack them then.
Of course, even 256-bit AES will eventually be broken. Everything will eventually be broken. But you have to consider that what you're buying for your encryption dollar isn't secrecy, period, but rather secrecy for a period of time. 256-bit AES buys more time.
Seems to me that the company dependent on the Pentagon shouldn't have the kind of say in counting votes for office that determine the Pentagon's budget.
Not while their products are closed systems, able to be rigged in secret, anyway.
First, it is indeed competition, even if it were theft. You're conflating moral and economic arguments. The moral ones matter only when they have economic impact. That's how international trade works.
Second, it's not "stealing" if Cisco, "stolen" from, still has what it had before. It's piracy, bootlegging, whatever you want to call getting one of your own that you're not entitled to without reducing the amount that the entitled party has.
And third, if that kind of competition from Huawei hurts Cisco, that's not Huwei's problem - it's Cisco's. Again, that's competition. And FWIW, if it's the same except it can't be supported by Cisco because its serial# isn't in the Cisco database (but is otherwise identical), then it's not a "crap product", unless the identical Cisco original is also crap. It's also speculative that someone who bought a counterfeit and was rejected by Cisco for support would indeed "sully Cisco's name", and not sully just the name of the vendor who sold them the counterfeit. A little, maybe, but not much.
None of this diminishes the damage the counterfeiter does to Cisco (and to the customer who's stuck without Cisco support). It's wrong, it's unfair competition, there are reasons it's illegal. But it's really opportunity cost, not actual loss, except the lost cost of marketing to that person buying the counterfeit instead, which is usually a negligible cost.
It's got to be stopped, especially for macroeconomic reasons that are sapping US industrial strength that I've discussed elsewhere in this thread. But it's not so plain, nor simple. Even if it is bad. It's important to keep the problem properly in mind, so it can actually be solved, instead of solving the wrong problem, which won't really work for the right problem.
Yet another reason to prohibit government interlinking databases except when explicitly authorized by the citizen (per transaction, with standing approval generating regular - quarterly, annual - reports consolidated from across the entire government). And expiration of stored personal data (with the same exceptions/reporting).
And in general exposing all of these stored data and their links, including lookups, except when specifically prohibited by rare national security reasons (challengable in court, provided only under court order, creating criminal penalties like jailtime for each violation even by "a government agent").
What's really necessary is a Privacy Amendment. These personal data are already protected by the 4th Amendment, and even that is redundant to the lack of created any power to invade privacy in the original Constitution. But obviously we need frequent reminders, in updated language, to prohibit the government from messing with our privacy. So we should amend the Constitution to say
The United States shall not store information about a specific person longer than the duration of the transaction into which that person delivered it, which duration shall be minimized, nor transmit such information outside of the minimum parties required for such a transaction, unless explicitly authorized by that person, under which authorization regular reporting of all such authorizations will be transmitted to that person no less frequently than once a year, or upon that person's request. Any exception to those restrictions will be authorized only by courts duly empowered by Congress and subject to frequent Congressional oversight, after due process including challenges by that person to secrecy and unauthorized access to their information.
Then we might be safe for a while, until we need to do something like that again. Information and the line between private/public is the essence of all government power, so the government will always push that line for its own benefit. Therefore the people must always push it back.
The IRS has lots of tools to discover and punish evasive, if not outright fraudulent, accounting. That's why I tie the patent fees and expiration to revenue, which should exactly match what's reported to the IRS. In the case of corporations, they must report to the IRS 4 times a year. With penalties every time they lie.
In fact the patent registration should be written by the government examiners, in the terms most easily comparable by later examiners. The applicant should submit an application and working model (even so long as the travesty of patenting software is allowed) that allows the examiner to understand the invention enough to describe it. That procedure alone would force enough attention and understanding by the examiner to make them gatekeepers, not travel agents. Then the registry itself would be less polluted by redundancy, triviality, and obvious increments, because they'd be obvious to examiners expert in its lingo, which anyone can learn just like they did, instead of patent lawyers inventing new lingo with every application to baffle examiners who just pass it on to the courts, which just pass it on to the appeals courts.
OK, whatever proteins or regulating this gene codes to do, one effect is that it stops HIV from replicating in infected cells which also contain the gene.
But what else does it do? I mean, "hot water" cleans my hands and prevents infection, but it can also burn me or drown me.
Where's the research into side effects of inserting or activating TRIM22 into cells where it wasn't naturally active before? Why isn't it functioning against the HIV in some cells where it could save the cell and the organism?
Messing with the immune system is what makes HIV itself so dangerous. Some people with HIV might have little to lose by trying it early, and there's other ways to investigate. I hope we get the research, and don't just skip it because "a cure for AIDS" would be so immediately profitable. Side effects are always important, and genes are the most complex chemicals in their effects we know.
That's the difference between short-term and long-term investment. The manufacturer building in the US has a higher manufacturing cost, but it's insurance against creating IP competition from an overseas supplier. It's not "altrustic", it's self defense. The competitors can save money short-term sending their IP overseas, but longer term (3 years? 5? 6 months?) their OEM will be likely to compete with them at lower cost.
The hole in that economics is that a US competitor can suicide by sending its IP overseas for manufacturing, and get killed by its OEM, creating an overseas competitor to the company that kept its IP safe in the US. The overseas competitor got good IP for cheaper than it cost to develop in the US, and has cheaper manufacturing. Especially if the killed US corp had better IP than the US corp it was competing with, because it could afford to invest in better IP since it had cheaper overseas manufacturing costs, the overseas competitor could wind up with both better IP and lower manufacturing costs, and (if it's smart) could even buy from the US customer it killed its brand IP in the firesale, and effectively have moved the original US corp overseas without paying to produce the IP (the investors in the company it killed take the loss).
Which is ultimately why these trade agreements have to require IP protection enforced by the foreign government. If the overseas corp is so easily able to rip off its US manufacturing customers for their IP, as has been demonstrated so many times, killing whole US industries, then there has to be some disincentive by the protector of the industry. And by the protector of the US market, too, because once all the US competitors are killed, the overseas corp will raise its prices to increase its profits (as Japan and others have demonstrated). That protector of US industries and markets is the US government. Countries which do not protect US companies from that kind of manufacturing/IP mugging should face trade tariffs that make it no more profitable to send IP there.
Cheap manufacturing is the weapon, stolen IP is the death blow. Stopping the IP stealing is one criterion for sensibly protective tariffs. The other big ones are environmental and labor protections, because that's a lot of the way foreign countries subsidize their manufacturing, by keeping it cheap at the expense of exploited environment and labor. Which of course is a cost to the US, also, especially the environment that we all share, but the exploited labor also contributes to political problems which are expensive, invariably to the US. The last big criterion for allowing access to US markets is how accessible is the overseas market to US exports, which itself is improved by increasing overseas environment and labor standards. The workers there will make more money, and demand more exports, especially as the local stuff isn't quite so cheap anymore because it's more expensive not to pollute.
As usual in economics, this stuff is a two-edged sword poking holes in a balloon. The balloon has to get only one hole to render its separation useless. The air is blowing out of the US now, sucked into China because they're running out their account in their environment and labor pool. Eventually it will equalize or die, but that could kill the US first. That kind of strategic optimization for mutual benefit is where governments are necessary and indispensible.
Too bad the current US government has colluded with China's mafia government every step of the way in reducing the US to China's standards, instead of the other way around.
"Body Submarines"? That doesn't mean some drug, it means a nanothin film I can wear on my body that lets me dive to thousands of meters under the sea!
AC current flows across the surface of human skin without chemically or physically affecting the human, if cycled at the proper frequencies. Let's see them gin up some hydrophilic/phobic janus particles that can lock together with titanium strength, but contour their shape to the body surface as defined by the AC flows across the skin. Modulating the AC flow pattern to expand out and contract again as we breathe from an air tank. We wouldn't even need special diving NOx mixes, because we wouldn't be pressured anymore into the bends.
And since the diameter of the "hull" would be only something like a half meter or so, instead of the several meters of submarine ships, we might keep structural integrity to really vast depths at which the relatively cavernous submarine ships would be crushed without internal support, given their surface:volume ratio. It all depends on the physics of the janus particle made for this app.
And given a thin dynamic surface modulated with AC across the dynamics of our flexible skin, we could even preserve our sense of touch, and even let our noncompressible hairs stick out, so we can feel the water and whatever we touch in it. Though we could selectively armor areas into gloves or other protected areas, again by modulating the AC.
On land, these sheaths could be invisible body shields, that weigh practically nothing, but redistribute force of incoming blows.
Science is cool. Science fiction, given the good science, is fun!
The current American penal system is rooted in the British system we inherited from the colonies, which arrested people and jailed them as a kidnap/ransom, until their families could pay off the damages of their crime, however long that took. Sometimes they arrested/jailed the family, and the larger family had to buy them out, if that was what it took, combined with the punitive effects of that treatment. And of course there was the effect of removing the criminals (and again, sometimes their family) from society, even shipping them off to Australia (which also had its other commercial advantages). It all had nothing to do with rehabilitating the criminal. It had to do with literally "paying your debt to society" in a very literal sense.
American jails were "revolutionized" in the 1800s partly under the "social deviance" theories of primitive psychologists. Who were called "alienists", because they based their theories on the principle that bad people were alienated from good society, or needed to be alienated from bad society. Hence the confinement in jail, which was supposed to get them away from bad society, and therefore the especially curative powers of solitary confinement:P. Americans acted like this was the "individuals's paradise", but people who blew it demonstrated they were more creatures of society rather than individuals, so they'd be forced to be individuals by isolating them. Of course, the jails are about the worst society in the country, often including (and sometimes especially) the jailers. So even though the resocialization didn't have anything like the total curative effect they said it would, because there's a lot more going on than just bad influences, to the degree that the theory was correct it had that much bad effect on people put into rotten homes with other rotten people, in jail.
Modern scientific psychology of course dates to Freud, and maybe a little earlier. Which means it was radical, counterintuitive, and even foreign until the 1930s at the earliest. The kind of popular awareness, let alone acceptance, of scientific psychology that we think is common today didn't even get started in the US until after WWII, and really saw its beginnings as the status quo only in the 1960s-70s. In fact, since it came of age in the 1960s, it was seen as part of the social revolution at that time, and is caught up as territory in the back and forth Culture War (usually cast as "liberal vs conservative"). So in much of the US, scientific psychology is not accepted even today.
The American prison system is the same as it was before the 1920s, so modern psychology is at best a thin veneer over the isolation/concentration/work camps of the 1800s, and not even a veneer in many places. Across much of rural America, they're really plantations that reflect our approach: criminals lose the social standing that comes with rights and privileges, especially in working and where you can live. And since America's economy runs on exploiting people at the bottom, it creates people like that as much as it can. Who of course stay in a vicious jail cycle.
And so today we have over 2 million people in jail at any one time, over 1% of all adults. In some communities where this system is particularly self-defeating, for social and historical reasons, the number is vastly higher, especially among vulnerable minority groups. I've heard that the majority of Black males will spend some of their life "in the system" to some degree, mostly locked up for at least some time, which means Black males are in general stigmatized and kept down in that group (even if by just expectations, including their own). America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, 100% at odds with our self image of "the freest people on Earth".
But we're also the most shrinked-up people on Earth. The kinds of people who never go to jail are the market for magazines like _Psychology Today_; the "easy major" for many regular people is "psychology", or eve
Putting a child in jail doesn't make them "start thinking more like an adult", unless you mean "an adult criminal".
The reason we don't put kids in jail for crimes we put adults in jail for is that there are more effective ways to deal with a kid criminal that have better results than jail. Kids are different from adults: they can usually still learn and set their lives right in ways that adults usually cannot. It's not out of some bleeding heart "mercy" or cowardice of treating a kid as bad as we'd treat an adult. It's because usually adults cannot really change the way that kids usually can.
If anything, we need to look harder at how adults can change as readily as children can, before just condemning them to jail that usually makes them worse. And yes, we should look at kids convicted of crimes to see whether they're as hopelessly unchangeable as most adults, before letting them off the jail hook. But only because that's what's actually the best (or least bad) option in either case.
The mentor can go right to jail, if they had reason to expect the kid would do what the mentor told them to do. And if there's no other way to get them straightened out.
Other than the brand name on the boxes being fraudulent, what is the difference between this HW and the real Cisco products? If they're even close in quality, then catching these fraudsters will move Chinese manufacturers to market them under their own brands. Then they'll just be violating patents, not trademarks (and copyrights in the manuals). But then they'll be pressured to actually create their own better ways of doing it. Which is actual progress, even if not quite as profitable as the ripoff.
If Chinese counterfeits can get marketed under their own brands, we'll actually have some price competition. And maybe when some American companies get killed by their OEM factories like Japanese manufacturers did to cameras and consumer electronics in the 1970s-80s, we'll see some more caution in shipping all their tech expertise overseas to create their competitors. They might be more likely to consider the less immediate costs of outsourcing from a country where the law (usually) protects things like intellectual property, contracts, labor and the environment.
Or maybe every generation is doomed to watch America squander its hard-won tech leads for the sake of a few years of cheap manufacturing that then eats the parent for lunch.
FWIW, I did say "I think there's plenty of room for lots of patents, so long as they're truly innovative,", which to me means "non-obvious", as is still in the legal patent requirements. I think the point is obvious;). But if you want me to explicitly agree that patents must be for "non obvious" inventions, you got it.
I think we mostly agree. Except that I think that not all incremental innovation is "obvious". It's largely a semantic disagreement, I expect. I'd say that the Pentium 4 was an incremental innovation over the P3, but not "obvious" (except to marketers, but not to an inventor). The P4/3.2GHz was an incremental, and obvious, innovation over the P4/2.8GHz, but the manufacturing processes to achieve it were not necessarily obvious. Likewise, even if the 45nm Cell IBM is making now instead of the 90nm Cell were identical in its wiring, then perhaps the 45nm version isn't actually a patentable innovation. But the 45nm manufacturing process that produces it is surely full of innovations over the 90nm process, because inventing them took real insight, investment, and (probably most important) risk.
Neither of those innovations "change the world" in ways not already changed by their predecessor they incremented. This kind of scenario is true in more small-scale inventions like, say, sewing machines. Not just if someone adds a second color thread spool to a feeder (though maybe, depending on how tricky it was to do it, compared with the state of the art prior to the increment). But if someone adds "reverse direction" to a unidirectional sewing machine, that's an increment that's not obvious to produce - even if demand for the feature were obvious.
But I disagree that it's impossible for a corporation to submit 5000 valid patents a year, 13.7 a day. Even Edison's patents were largely invented by salaried engineers working for him, and plenty of his patents were for inspiration and perspiration by others he just hired (and screwed out of their invention). Microsoft employs thousands of researchers, in a field where they don't have to spend days of chemistry and blacksmithy to test each possible invention. If you allow SW patents (and I wouldn't, but we're not talking about that), then why shouldn't Microsoft's hundreds of engineers, with the Internet for research, workstations for development, and a century of engineering culture, training and tools since Edison, be more productive than "Edison" (or his lab)?
You're using a bad case to argue. Because Microsoft does indeed abuse the system. But not just because it's so cheap for MS to apply for patents on trivial, obvious increments. MS can afford to spend $1000 or $10000 on filing every one of its 5000 patents a year. MS is making tens of billions off its operation that's beefed up (at least in court and the stock market propaganda) by its patent portfolio. It can spend $50M a year if that's the price of admission. In fact, in the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaco giants have cranked up the cost of rolling out a new drug to over $100M, precisely to keep new competitors from entering their industry. The high cost of R&D works against smaller inventors, against much innovation, against progress. But it keeps the pharmacos rolling in money, so that's what we've got.
The simple way to deal with all of that is to simplify the system (like eliminating patents on anything not demonstrated by a working mechanical model), to move the vetting to the application phase instead of the courts, and to ensure the examiners are skilled and motivated to discard any application not proving it's novel, non-obvious, working and valuable. And, as I mentioned, expires patents once their ROI has been sufficiently protected, like after 10x (or maybe even 100x - the specific economics deserve more careful review than a few Slashdot posts). And, as you described, incent and enable the public to return thes
Of course there are fake inventions that aren't patentable. But there are plenty of inventions that aren't obvious, are novel, and require anyone (except the most impossibly lucky) to have both good ideas and hard work to develop them into real inventions, but which aren't society changing. There's a whole range of inventions that are real, aren't just incremental, but which need to be protected against copying by unfair competitors. Otherwise that incremental innovation will see much less activity. All the progress is important and beneficial to society, not just the big ticket items. Further, the big ticket items are usually produced by inventors with more of their own ability to protect their invention from competition until at least the ROI justifies the investment. So that class of smaller inventions is precisely what patents must protect.
The point is that "incremental innovation" isn't an oxymoron. You just have to recognize that not every invention is the motorized flight, transistor or paper clip. The patent system has to cover all that, even if it does exclude the huge span of trivial innovations, as well as excluding copyright / trade secret stuff like business methods and software.
The MS example would fall apart under what I'm describing. For one, SW wouldn't get patented. But even if it did, patenting stuff that's not really an invention, like most of their 5000 a year, wouldn't pass examination. It would be rejected as merely incremental, at best an update of an existing patent of theirs. And even if they did patent 5000 such "inventions", the fees from all of them, including any of those 5000 that MS made any money from, would pay to operate the examination and challenge system. MS would be encouraged not to patent many of those increments, and defend them as mere increments of existing patents, or keep them as trade secrets in its proprietary software. Or just go out and sell stuff made from it and make its money that way, protecting its investment with just marketing (and abusing its self-made market monopoly) and aggressive sales. Meanwhile, little people with better actual innovations, like maybe, say, a new P2P filesystem (if we allow SW patents, which I wouldn't), would be protected from MS just copying their invention once proven and marketing it as part of their bundle, crushing the investor who's already exhausted much of their time and money they can afford. But only if that filesystem is actually novel and non-obvious etc.
That MHGA28-1TC is very cool. At about $800 for dual 20Gbps, that's $200 for the equivalent of 10Gbps, which costs $500 standalone. But a much more usable package, without de/muxing to get 20Gbps, and probably better ability to "bond" (or equivalent) across both 20Gbps ports for simulated 40Gbps. If only there were more competitors, it might be closer to $100 per each 10Gbps, which is cheaper than even standalone 1Gbps now, and of course much more integrated (lower power, more manageable, less HW...).
Since the product is on the market, there's probably not that much demand right now, or there would be more competitors.
Thanks for clarifying this entire discussion. I rarely learn this much from just whining on Slashdot:).
I already described in this thread how a single host can saturate 10Gbps. And multiple cards have sync problems. De/muxing 50Gbps across 5-8 cards is a huge problem, in sync and just CPU power that's better off in an ASIC/DSP/FPGA in the network controller.
Most innovation isn't $billion innovation, it's that "small-time" innovation. Those small innovators need some protection from better funded, but lazier/dumber competitors who'd just copy and start competing with them after the inventor has exhausted time and money getting to the release. You can bet that the big companies will be most of those predators. Which, as easy money (especially risk-free), will substitute for them investing in "bigtime" innovation.
The patent system has to protect everyone equally, as is typical (even required) under the Constitution. But again, I think there's plenty of room for lots of patents, so long as they're truly innovative, and truly a limited time government monopoly defined by protecting just the minimum return to justify investment, not the maximum as now. And combined with better self-financing appropriate to a larger scale of examiners, plus the distributed public system you described, I think the resulting system can satisfy both of us.
I've got a very large collection of live music recorded (legitimately) by people in the audience, like Deadheads, over the past 30-50 years. And a solid percentage of that by bytes is video.
A 180GB drive holds only 45 DVDs. When you're talking about hundreds of shows on video, you're talking about dozens of drives.
It's not yet at the point where I need more than 1Gbps, but that's mainly because I don't have the SW quite running seamlessly for real home multimedia. But I'm still accumulating content, including a Blu-Ray drive (40GB movies, not 4GB). By the time >10Gbps ethernet is <$100 a port, I'll be able to justify it with my personal mediasphere.
Yes, we do live in an age of miracles. "Fast, cheap and good", even it's all in the middle range of those parameters, is available, and the peaks available mean even the middle is quite nice. But that's the reason to push the peaks, to raise the middle.
Well, if you compare that to 1% of revenue, it's not very much. But at least my system isn't a complete change from the current structure. Just one made proportional, which is always a better model.
The patents are already accounted for in valuing the owning corporation's intellectual property assets towards the valuation of the corporation. There are indeed accounting techniques to do this. In small, simple shops run by inventors that don't already do that valuation, their valuation will be correspondingly simple. The complex ones are already doing it because of their other accounting requirements.
So while that system would require some accountants, it's largely automable. Since this system generates revenue, it should be able to pay the accountants to ensure the revenue and corresponding fees are managed properly. Either by the inventor, or even by the government.
In fact, the entire economy could use the clarity that making such valuations commonplace would deliver. I know that when I was selling my corporate assets, both to my partners and to some adversarial parties, the valuation question was a nightmare. Which meant a job program for lawyers, which is much less productive than for accountants.
Treating info as property will necessarily require those extra hired hands. Just like a farm requires more than just a farmer and their ox, the sun and the rain. The trick is to grow up and call it what it's really worth, to manage it on value not merely on control. It took society a long time until the Bablyonians (AFAICT) invented rent and written records for the exchanges, then a few thousand years coasting. A couple hundred years to come up with proper basic intellectual property rules and management techniques seems quite quick.
Why is revenue too hard to account for? They have to report it on their taxes, or face income tax fraud in addition to whatever patent fraud.
There's not going to be a fair fee on that kind of scale. If I patent something that cost me $20,000 to invent, and $20,000 a year to market, but "advanced science or the useful arts" so much that it took that investment just to finally sell $30,000 worth in the fifth year, then that $10,000 is going to make it a lot harder to get my return. Any amount that's just a fixed fee without tying that fee to the actual value of the patent is going to often work against invention. Especially for the smaller inventors who need the patent protection the most.
My system will actually work for everyone. It's actually a lot like the "IP property tax" that some people are starting to suggest. Except it's closer to a sales tax, the fairest kind, than to either an income tax (more an inhibitor than an enhancer) or real estate tax (the most regressive). It suits both the mission of advancement and the real economics inventions operate in.
The part you missed was where I said "the point is that there are already machines that can use that bandwidth". My TV's HDMI port already does 10Gbps. When I want to mix a couple PiP streams with incoming videophone and a peek at the front door for the pizza delivery, all in HD swapped around my house to different TVs to get someone to answer the door so I can stay on the phone (or some other common combination), that kind of bandwidth won't seem so exotic.
Of course I want to go "on the cheap". Everyone wants to go "on the cheap": the lowest price possible (even if no lower than possible). Even before I get that kind of home media distribution, I do indeed have apps (like VoIP) that I'd like to invest $5000 on some Cell blade processor rather than $50K on just the networking.
Bandwidth demands are exploding. Even telcos don't have 100Gbps over 2550Km yet, as the demo we're discussing demonstrates. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" should be warning enough. When "on the cheap" is near the limits of what what's available at any price, we need to hurry up and extend the horizon further. Or we'll soon fall off the edge.
40 SATA drives is no big deal. I've got over a dozen SATA drives running in my home, mostly to store my media collection. And I haven't even begun collecting video, because 750GB-1TB drives aren't that cheap yet. Once drives drop below $0.10:GB, and there are more HD video titles (especially if for download or TiVo), 40 SATA drives will be fairly common in many homes, to say nothing of the media servers that are servicing them.
Just getting the monopoly is no guarantee of profits to defray the registration costs. But there are costs on both sides of the PTO table, including the litigation where most of the "examination" is currently done post facto. That's why I tax the revenue from all patents, at a very small rate, but which would surely return enough on average across all patents to process and litigate them all. Especially since funding more and better examination up front would reduce the later litigation.
And the bounty system we both like would further increase efficiency. In fact, if the bounty system is put on a generous lottery basis for all contributors, awarding maybe only 1/2 of bounty applicants, the system would produce even more results at lower costs, with a high productivity. We can probably afford to spend a decade tweaking the thresholds into proper proportions and rules for maintaining them. The point is to switch away from the current monopoly giveaway we both hate.
PS: That post my 16,362nd. Probably fun to post #16384. My UID is (nearly exactly) 1/3 yours, so we were at equal rates when I posted #15313 - you're at 93.6% of mine. We both probably need a faster connection just to keep up with our posting rate;).
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For one, even the oversimplification of when your "basic personaltiy is set" extends to 5 years old (and of course longer for some people).
For another, your idea of criminality is like something out of the 1800s and phrenology or something. People committing crime isn't just a matter of their "basic preschool personality". There's plenty of time, through puberty and even a little beyond, for people to learn to overcome even "basic personality" defects, and acquire the self control to stay away from crimes. It's even possible for adults to learn to change, or we'd see 100% recidivism especially with our usually counterproductive penal system.
But yes, looking at the person and deciding what will most likely stop them doing crimes in the future (without resorting to absurd remedies like handing them a permanent open ticket to Disneyworld or something) should be the basic operation of our corrections system.
It doesn't matter that much that there's little difference right now between 128-bit and 256-bit AES. It will matter later. There will almost certainly be time after 128-bit AES is broken but before 256-bit is broken. During that time, the extra 128 bits will mean the difference between secure and insecure. And remember, attackers who can read but not crack your messages can still keep them for later when they're crackable. If your messages still have value at that time, they will crack them then.
Of course, even 256-bit AES will eventually be broken. Everything will eventually be broken. But you have to consider that what you're buying for your encryption dollar isn't secrecy, period, but rather secrecy for a period of time. 256-bit AES buys more time.
Seems to me that the company dependent on the Pentagon shouldn't have the kind of say in counting votes for office that determine the Pentagon's budget.
Not while their products are closed systems, able to be rigged in secret, anyway.
First, it is indeed competition, even if it were theft. You're conflating moral and economic arguments. The moral ones matter only when they have economic impact. That's how international trade works.
Second, it's not "stealing" if Cisco, "stolen" from, still has what it had before. It's piracy, bootlegging, whatever you want to call getting one of your own that you're not entitled to without reducing the amount that the entitled party has.
And third, if that kind of competition from Huawei hurts Cisco, that's not Huwei's problem - it's Cisco's. Again, that's competition. And FWIW, if it's the same except it can't be supported by Cisco because its serial# isn't in the Cisco database (but is otherwise identical), then it's not a "crap product", unless the identical Cisco original is also crap. It's also speculative that someone who bought a counterfeit and was rejected by Cisco for support would indeed "sully Cisco's name", and not sully just the name of the vendor who sold them the counterfeit. A little, maybe, but not much.
None of this diminishes the damage the counterfeiter does to Cisco (and to the customer who's stuck without Cisco support). It's wrong, it's unfair competition, there are reasons it's illegal. But it's really opportunity cost, not actual loss, except the lost cost of marketing to that person buying the counterfeit instead, which is usually a negligible cost.
It's got to be stopped, especially for macroeconomic reasons that are sapping US industrial strength that I've discussed elsewhere in this thread. But it's not so plain, nor simple. Even if it is bad. It's important to keep the problem properly in mind, so it can actually be solved, instead of solving the wrong problem, which won't really work for the right problem.
And in general exposing all of these stored data and their links, including lookups, except when specifically prohibited by rare national security reasons (challengable in court, provided only under court order, creating criminal penalties like jailtime for each violation even by "a government agent").
What's really necessary is a Privacy Amendment. These personal data are already protected by the 4th Amendment, and even that is redundant to the lack of created any power to invade privacy in the original Constitution. But obviously we need frequent reminders, in updated language, to prohibit the government from messing with our privacy. So we should amend the Constitution to say
Then we might be safe for a while, until we need to do something like that again. Information and the line between private/public is the essence of all government power, so the government will always push that line for its own benefit. Therefore the people must always push it back.
The IRS has lots of tools to discover and punish evasive, if not outright fraudulent, accounting. That's why I tie the patent fees and expiration to revenue, which should exactly match what's reported to the IRS. In the case of corporations, they must report to the IRS 4 times a year. With penalties every time they lie.
In fact the patent registration should be written by the government examiners, in the terms most easily comparable by later examiners. The applicant should submit an application and working model (even so long as the travesty of patenting software is allowed) that allows the examiner to understand the invention enough to describe it. That procedure alone would force enough attention and understanding by the examiner to make them gatekeepers, not travel agents. Then the registry itself would be less polluted by redundancy, triviality, and obvious increments, because they'd be obvious to examiners expert in its lingo, which anyone can learn just like they did, instead of patent lawyers inventing new lingo with every application to baffle examiners who just pass it on to the courts, which just pass it on to the appeals courts.
OK, whatever proteins or regulating this gene codes to do, one effect is that it stops HIV from replicating in infected cells which also contain the gene.
But what else does it do? I mean, "hot water" cleans my hands and prevents infection, but it can also burn me or drown me.
Where's the research into side effects of inserting or activating TRIM22 into cells where it wasn't naturally active before? Why isn't it functioning against the HIV in some cells where it could save the cell and the organism?
Messing with the immune system is what makes HIV itself so dangerous. Some people with HIV might have little to lose by trying it early, and there's other ways to investigate. I hope we get the research, and don't just skip it because "a cure for AIDS" would be so immediately profitable. Side effects are always important, and genes are the most complex chemicals in their effects we know.
That's the difference between short-term and long-term investment. The manufacturer building in the US has a higher manufacturing cost, but it's insurance against creating IP competition from an overseas supplier. It's not "altrustic", it's self defense. The competitors can save money short-term sending their IP overseas, but longer term (3 years? 5? 6 months?) their OEM will be likely to compete with them at lower cost.
The hole in that economics is that a US competitor can suicide by sending its IP overseas for manufacturing, and get killed by its OEM, creating an overseas competitor to the company that kept its IP safe in the US. The overseas competitor got good IP for cheaper than it cost to develop in the US, and has cheaper manufacturing. Especially if the killed US corp had better IP than the US corp it was competing with, because it could afford to invest in better IP since it had cheaper overseas manufacturing costs, the overseas competitor could wind up with both better IP and lower manufacturing costs, and (if it's smart) could even buy from the US customer it killed its brand IP in the firesale, and effectively have moved the original US corp overseas without paying to produce the IP (the investors in the company it killed take the loss).
Which is ultimately why these trade agreements have to require IP protection enforced by the foreign government. If the overseas corp is so easily able to rip off its US manufacturing customers for their IP, as has been demonstrated so many times, killing whole US industries, then there has to be some disincentive by the protector of the industry. And by the protector of the US market, too, because once all the US competitors are killed, the overseas corp will raise its prices to increase its profits (as Japan and others have demonstrated). That protector of US industries and markets is the US government. Countries which do not protect US companies from that kind of manufacturing/IP mugging should face trade tariffs that make it no more profitable to send IP there.
Cheap manufacturing is the weapon, stolen IP is the death blow. Stopping the IP stealing is one criterion for sensibly protective tariffs. The other big ones are environmental and labor protections, because that's a lot of the way foreign countries subsidize their manufacturing, by keeping it cheap at the expense of exploited environment and labor. Which of course is a cost to the US, also, especially the environment that we all share, but the exploited labor also contributes to political problems which are expensive, invariably to the US. The last big criterion for allowing access to US markets is how accessible is the overseas market to US exports, which itself is improved by increasing overseas environment and labor standards. The workers there will make more money, and demand more exports, especially as the local stuff isn't quite so cheap anymore because it's more expensive not to pollute.
As usual in economics, this stuff is a two-edged sword poking holes in a balloon. The balloon has to get only one hole to render its separation useless. The air is blowing out of the US now, sucked into China because they're running out their account in their environment and labor pool. Eventually it will equalize or die, but that could kill the US first. That kind of strategic optimization for mutual benefit is where governments are necessary and indispensible.
Too bad the current US government has colluded with China's mafia government every step of the way in reducing the US to China's standards, instead of the other way around.
"Body Submarines"? That doesn't mean some drug, it means a nanothin film I can wear on my body that lets me dive to thousands of meters under the sea!
AC current flows across the surface of human skin without chemically or physically affecting the human, if cycled at the proper frequencies. Let's see them gin up some hydrophilic/phobic janus particles that can lock together with titanium strength, but contour their shape to the body surface as defined by the AC flows across the skin. Modulating the AC flow pattern to expand out and contract again as we breathe from an air tank. We wouldn't even need special diving NOx mixes, because we wouldn't be pressured anymore into the bends.
And since the diameter of the "hull" would be only something like a half meter or so, instead of the several meters of submarine ships, we might keep structural integrity to really vast depths at which the relatively cavernous submarine ships would be crushed without internal support, given their surface:volume ratio. It all depends on the physics of the janus particle made for this app.
And given a thin dynamic surface modulated with AC across the dynamics of our flexible skin, we could even preserve our sense of touch, and even let our noncompressible hairs stick out, so we can feel the water and whatever we touch in it. Though we could selectively armor areas into gloves or other protected areas, again by modulating the AC.
On land, these sheaths could be invisible body shields, that weigh practically nothing, but redistribute force of incoming blows.
Science is cool. Science fiction, given the good science, is fun!
That's a well considered approach.
:P. Americans acted like this was the "individuals's paradise", but people who blew it demonstrated they were more creatures of society rather than individuals, so they'd be forced to be individuals by isolating them. Of course, the jails are about the worst society in the country, often including (and sometimes especially) the jailers. So even though the resocialization didn't have anything like the total curative effect they said it would, because there's a lot more going on than just bad influences, to the degree that the theory was correct it had that much bad effect on people put into rotten homes with other rotten people, in jail.
The current American penal system is rooted in the British system we inherited from the colonies, which arrested people and jailed them as a kidnap/ransom, until their families could pay off the damages of their crime, however long that took. Sometimes they arrested/jailed the family, and the larger family had to buy them out, if that was what it took, combined with the punitive effects of that treatment. And of course there was the effect of removing the criminals (and again, sometimes their family) from society, even shipping them off to Australia (which also had its other commercial advantages). It all had nothing to do with rehabilitating the criminal. It had to do with literally "paying your debt to society" in a very literal sense.
American jails were "revolutionized" in the 1800s partly under the "social deviance" theories of primitive psychologists. Who were called "alienists", because they based their theories on the principle that bad people were alienated from good society, or needed to be alienated from bad society. Hence the confinement in jail, which was supposed to get them away from bad society, and therefore the especially curative powers of solitary confinement
Modern scientific psychology of course dates to Freud, and maybe a little earlier. Which means it was radical, counterintuitive, and even foreign until the 1930s at the earliest. The kind of popular awareness, let alone acceptance, of scientific psychology that we think is common today didn't even get started in the US until after WWII, and really saw its beginnings as the status quo only in the 1960s-70s. In fact, since it came of age in the 1960s, it was seen as part of the social revolution at that time, and is caught up as territory in the back and forth Culture War (usually cast as "liberal vs conservative"). So in much of the US, scientific psychology is not accepted even today.
The American prison system is the same as it was before the 1920s, so modern psychology is at best a thin veneer over the isolation/concentration/work camps of the 1800s, and not even a veneer in many places. Across much of rural America, they're really plantations that reflect our approach: criminals lose the social standing that comes with rights and privileges, especially in working and where you can live. And since America's economy runs on exploiting people at the bottom, it creates people like that as much as it can. Who of course stay in a vicious jail cycle.
And so today we have over 2 million people in jail at any one time, over 1% of all adults. In some communities where this system is particularly self-defeating, for social and historical reasons, the number is vastly higher, especially among vulnerable minority groups. I've heard that the majority of Black males will spend some of their life "in the system" to some degree, mostly locked up for at least some time, which means Black males are in general stigmatized and kept down in that group (even if by just expectations, including their own). America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, 100% at odds with our self image of "the freest people on Earth".
But we're also the most shrinked-up people on Earth. The kinds of people who never go to jail are the market for magazines like _Psychology Today_; the "easy major" for many regular people is "psychology", or eve
Putting a child in jail doesn't make them "start thinking more like an adult", unless you mean "an adult criminal".
The reason we don't put kids in jail for crimes we put adults in jail for is that there are more effective ways to deal with a kid criminal that have better results than jail. Kids are different from adults: they can usually still learn and set their lives right in ways that adults usually cannot. It's not out of some bleeding heart "mercy" or cowardice of treating a kid as bad as we'd treat an adult. It's because usually adults cannot really change the way that kids usually can.
If anything, we need to look harder at how adults can change as readily as children can, before just condemning them to jail that usually makes them worse. And yes, we should look at kids convicted of crimes to see whether they're as hopelessly unchangeable as most adults, before letting them off the jail hook. But only because that's what's actually the best (or least bad) option in either case.
The mentor can go right to jail, if they had reason to expect the kid would do what the mentor told them to do. And if there's no other way to get them straightened out.
Other than the brand name on the boxes being fraudulent, what is the difference between this HW and the real Cisco products? If they're even close in quality, then catching these fraudsters will move Chinese manufacturers to market them under their own brands. Then they'll just be violating patents, not trademarks (and copyrights in the manuals). But then they'll be pressured to actually create their own better ways of doing it. Which is actual progress, even if not quite as profitable as the ripoff.
If Chinese counterfeits can get marketed under their own brands, we'll actually have some price competition. And maybe when some American companies get killed by their OEM factories like Japanese manufacturers did to cameras and consumer electronics in the 1970s-80s, we'll see some more caution in shipping all their tech expertise overseas to create their competitors. They might be more likely to consider the less immediate costs of outsourcing from a country where the law (usually) protects things like intellectual property, contracts, labor and the environment.
Or maybe every generation is doomed to watch America squander its hard-won tech leads for the sake of a few years of cheap manufacturing that then eats the parent for lunch.
FWIW, I did say "I think there's plenty of room for lots of patents, so long as they're truly innovative,", which to me means "non-obvious", as is still in the legal patent requirements. I think the point is obvious ;). But if you want me to explicitly agree that patents must be for "non obvious" inventions, you got it.
I think we mostly agree. Except that I think that not all incremental innovation is "obvious". It's largely a semantic disagreement, I expect. I'd say that the Pentium 4 was an incremental innovation over the P3, but not "obvious" (except to marketers, but not to an inventor). The P4/3.2GHz was an incremental, and obvious, innovation over the P4/2.8GHz, but the manufacturing processes to achieve it were not necessarily obvious. Likewise, even if the 45nm Cell IBM is making now instead of the 90nm Cell were identical in its wiring, then perhaps the 45nm version isn't actually a patentable innovation. But the 45nm manufacturing process that produces it is surely full of innovations over the 90nm process, because inventing them took real insight, investment, and (probably most important) risk.
Neither of those innovations "change the world" in ways not already changed by their predecessor they incremented. This kind of scenario is true in more small-scale inventions like, say, sewing machines. Not just if someone adds a second color thread spool to a feeder (though maybe, depending on how tricky it was to do it, compared with the state of the art prior to the increment). But if someone adds "reverse direction" to a unidirectional sewing machine, that's an increment that's not obvious to produce - even if demand for the feature were obvious.
But I disagree that it's impossible for a corporation to submit 5000 valid patents a year, 13.7 a day. Even Edison's patents were largely invented by salaried engineers working for him, and plenty of his patents were for inspiration and perspiration by others he just hired (and screwed out of their invention). Microsoft employs thousands of researchers, in a field where they don't have to spend days of chemistry and blacksmithy to test each possible invention. If you allow SW patents (and I wouldn't, but we're not talking about that), then why shouldn't Microsoft's hundreds of engineers, with the Internet for research, workstations for development, and a century of engineering culture, training and tools since Edison, be more productive than "Edison" (or his lab)?
You're using a bad case to argue. Because Microsoft does indeed abuse the system. But not just because it's so cheap for MS to apply for patents on trivial, obvious increments. MS can afford to spend $1000 or $10000 on filing every one of its 5000 patents a year. MS is making tens of billions off its operation that's beefed up (at least in court and the stock market propaganda) by its patent portfolio. It can spend $50M a year if that's the price of admission. In fact, in the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaco giants have cranked up the cost of rolling out a new drug to over $100M, precisely to keep new competitors from entering their industry. The high cost of R&D works against smaller inventors, against much innovation, against progress. But it keeps the pharmacos rolling in money, so that's what we've got.
The simple way to deal with all of that is to simplify the system (like eliminating patents on anything not demonstrated by a working mechanical model), to move the vetting to the application phase instead of the courts, and to ensure the examiners are skilled and motivated to discard any application not proving it's novel, non-obvious, working and valuable. And, as I mentioned, expires patents once their ROI has been sufficiently protected, like after 10x (or maybe even 100x - the specific economics deserve more careful review than a few Slashdot posts). And, as you described, incent and enable the public to return thes
Of course there are fake inventions that aren't patentable. But there are plenty of inventions that aren't obvious, are novel, and require anyone (except the most impossibly lucky) to have both good ideas and hard work to develop them into real inventions, but which aren't society changing. There's a whole range of inventions that are real, aren't just incremental, but which need to be protected against copying by unfair competitors. Otherwise that incremental innovation will see much less activity. All the progress is important and beneficial to society, not just the big ticket items. Further, the big ticket items are usually produced by inventors with more of their own ability to protect their invention from competition until at least the ROI justifies the investment. So that class of smaller inventions is precisely what patents must protect.
The point is that "incremental innovation" isn't an oxymoron. You just have to recognize that not every invention is the motorized flight, transistor or paper clip. The patent system has to cover all that, even if it does exclude the huge span of trivial innovations, as well as excluding copyright / trade secret stuff like business methods and software.
The MS example would fall apart under what I'm describing. For one, SW wouldn't get patented. But even if it did, patenting stuff that's not really an invention, like most of their 5000 a year, wouldn't pass examination. It would be rejected as merely incremental, at best an update of an existing patent of theirs. And even if they did patent 5000 such "inventions", the fees from all of them, including any of those 5000 that MS made any money from, would pay to operate the examination and challenge system. MS would be encouraged not to patent many of those increments, and defend them as mere increments of existing patents, or keep them as trade secrets in its proprietary software. Or just go out and sell stuff made from it and make its money that way, protecting its investment with just marketing (and abusing its self-made market monopoly) and aggressive sales. Meanwhile, little people with better actual innovations, like maybe, say, a new P2P filesystem (if we allow SW patents, which I wouldn't), would be protected from MS just copying their invention once proven and marketing it as part of their bundle, crushing the investor who's already exhausted much of their time and money they can afford. But only if that filesystem is actually novel and non-obvious etc.
That MHGA28-1TC is very cool. At about $800 for dual 20Gbps, that's $200 for the equivalent of 10Gbps, which costs $500 standalone. But a much more usable package, without de/muxing to get 20Gbps, and probably better ability to "bond" (or equivalent) across both 20Gbps ports for simulated 40Gbps. If only there were more competitors, it might be closer to $100 per each 10Gbps, which is cheaper than even standalone 1Gbps now, and of course much more integrated (lower power, more manageable, less HW...).
:).
Since the product is on the market, there's probably not that much demand right now, or there would be more competitors.
Thanks for clarifying this entire discussion. I rarely learn this much from just whining on Slashdot
I already described in this thread how a single host can saturate 10Gbps. And multiple cards have sync problems. De/muxing 50Gbps across 5-8 cards is a huge problem, in sync and just CPU power that's better off in an ASIC/DSP/FPGA in the network controller.
Most innovation isn't $billion innovation, it's that "small-time" innovation. Those small innovators need some protection from better funded, but lazier/dumber competitors who'd just copy and start competing with them after the inventor has exhausted time and money getting to the release. You can bet that the big companies will be most of those predators. Which, as easy money (especially risk-free), will substitute for them investing in "bigtime" innovation.
The patent system has to protect everyone equally, as is typical (even required) under the Constitution. But again, I think there's plenty of room for lots of patents, so long as they're truly innovative, and truly a limited time government monopoly defined by protecting just the minimum return to justify investment, not the maximum as now. And combined with better self-financing appropriate to a larger scale of examiners, plus the distributed public system you described, I think the resulting system can satisfy both of us.
I've got a very large collection of live music recorded (legitimately) by people in the audience, like Deadheads, over the past 30-50 years. And a solid percentage of that by bytes is video.
A 180GB drive holds only 45 DVDs. When you're talking about hundreds of shows on video, you're talking about dozens of drives.
It's not yet at the point where I need more than 1Gbps, but that's mainly because I don't have the SW quite running seamlessly for real home multimedia. But I'm still accumulating content, including a Blu-Ray drive (40GB movies, not 4GB). By the time >10Gbps ethernet is <$100 a port, I'll be able to justify it with my personal mediasphere.
Yes, we do live in an age of miracles. "Fast, cheap and good", even it's all in the middle range of those parameters, is available, and the peaks available mean even the middle is quite nice. But that's the reason to push the peaks, to raise the middle.
Well, if you compare that to 1% of revenue, it's not very much. But at least my system isn't a complete change from the current structure. Just one made proportional, which is always a better model.
The patents are already accounted for in valuing the owning corporation's intellectual property assets towards the valuation of the corporation. There are indeed accounting techniques to do this. In small, simple shops run by inventors that don't already do that valuation, their valuation will be correspondingly simple. The complex ones are already doing it because of their other accounting requirements.
So while that system would require some accountants, it's largely automable. Since this system generates revenue, it should be able to pay the accountants to ensure the revenue and corresponding fees are managed properly. Either by the inventor, or even by the government.
In fact, the entire economy could use the clarity that making such valuations commonplace would deliver. I know that when I was selling my corporate assets, both to my partners and to some adversarial parties, the valuation question was a nightmare. Which meant a job program for lawyers, which is much less productive than for accountants.
Treating info as property will necessarily require those extra hired hands. Just like a farm requires more than just a farmer and their ox, the sun and the rain. The trick is to grow up and call it what it's really worth, to manage it on value not merely on control. It took society a long time until the Bablyonians (AFAICT) invented rent and written records for the exchanges, then a few thousand years coasting. A couple hundred years to come up with proper basic intellectual property rules and management techniques seems quite quick.
Why is revenue too hard to account for? They have to report it on their taxes, or face income tax fraud in addition to whatever patent fraud.
There's not going to be a fair fee on that kind of scale. If I patent something that cost me $20,000 to invent, and $20,000 a year to market, but "advanced science or the useful arts" so much that it took that investment just to finally sell $30,000 worth in the fifth year, then that $10,000 is going to make it a lot harder to get my return. Any amount that's just a fixed fee without tying that fee to the actual value of the patent is going to often work against invention. Especially for the smaller inventors who need the patent protection the most.
My system will actually work for everyone. It's actually a lot like the "IP property tax" that some people are starting to suggest. Except it's closer to a sales tax, the fairest kind, than to either an income tax (more an inhibitor than an enhancer) or real estate tax (the most regressive). It suits both the mission of advancement and the real economics inventions operate in.
The part you missed was where I said "the point is that there are already machines that can use that bandwidth". My TV's HDMI port already does 10Gbps. When I want to mix a couple PiP streams with incoming videophone and a peek at the front door for the pizza delivery, all in HD swapped around my house to different TVs to get someone to answer the door so I can stay on the phone (or some other common combination), that kind of bandwidth won't seem so exotic.
Of course I want to go "on the cheap". Everyone wants to go "on the cheap": the lowest price possible (even if no lower than possible). Even before I get that kind of home media distribution, I do indeed have apps (like VoIP) that I'd like to invest $5000 on some Cell blade processor rather than $50K on just the networking.
Bandwidth demands are exploding. Even telcos don't have 100Gbps over 2550Km yet, as the demo we're discussing demonstrates. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" should be warning enough. When "on the cheap" is near the limits of what what's available at any price, we need to hurry up and extend the horizon further. Or we'll soon fall off the edge.
40 SATA drives is no big deal. I've got over a dozen SATA drives running in my home, mostly to store my media collection. And I haven't even begun collecting video, because 750GB-1TB drives aren't that cheap yet. Once drives drop below $0.10:GB, and there are more HD video titles (especially if for download or TiVo), 40 SATA drives will be fairly common in many homes, to say nothing of the media servers that are servicing them.
Just getting the monopoly is no guarantee of profits to defray the registration costs. But there are costs on both sides of the PTO table, including the litigation where most of the "examination" is currently done post facto. That's why I tax the revenue from all patents, at a very small rate, but which would surely return enough on average across all patents to process and litigate them all. Especially since funding more and better examination up front would reduce the later litigation.
And the bounty system we both like would further increase efficiency. In fact, if the bounty system is put on a generous lottery basis for all contributors, awarding maybe only 1/2 of bounty applicants, the system would produce even more results at lower costs, with a high productivity. We can probably afford to spend a decade tweaking the thresholds into proper proportions and rules for maintaining them. The point is to switch away from the current monopoly giveaway we both hate.
PS: That post my 16,362nd. Probably fun to post #16384. My UID is (nearly exactly) 1/3 yours, so we were at equal rates when I posted #15313 - you're at 93.6% of mine. We both probably need a faster connection just to keep up with our posting rate ;).